Mary J. Lowe, 74, U.S. Judge Noted for Her Rulings on Bias

By ERIC PACE

Published: March 3, 1999

Judge Mary Johnson Lowe, a Federal judge in the Southern District of New York who was known for her rulings in discrimination cases, died Saturday at a hospital in Las Vegas, Nev. She was 74 and had homes in the Bronx and Las Vegas.

The cause was heart failure, and she had been in declining health, a daughter, Leslie H. Lowe, said.

Judge Lowe was the second black woman appointed to the Federal judiciary, according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. She was recommended by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and appointed by President Carter in 1978. At the time, there were 400 Federal trial judges, 15 of whom were black and 5 of whom were female.

As a senior judge, a status she acquired in 1991, she sat on the bench here for part of the year, and had been doing some judicial work while in Las Vegas.

Earlier, she was a judge of the Criminal Court of the City of New York from 1971 until 1973, when she was named an Acting State Supreme Court Justice assigned to the Manhattan Supreme Court's Centralized Narcotics Term. She held that post, sitting in Manhattan, until 1974. She served on the Supreme Court in Bronx County in 1975 and 1976. In 1977 she was elected a justice of the State Supreme Court.

In 1984, in District Court in Manhattan, she issued a widely noted injunction barring New York City from ''refusing to allow homeless individuals to register to vote on the ground that they fail to inhabit traditional residences.'' She said the city's Board of Elections had defined the term ''residence'' to exclude ''an entire group of otherwise eligible voters,'' estimated at the time at 20,000.

In the ruling, she said that voter residency requirements could be satisfied by ''homeless individuals identifying a specific location within a political community which they consider their home base, to which they return regularly, manifest an intent to remain for the present, and from which they can receive messages and be contacted.''

In 1981 she ruled that a New York City pension system, which assumed that women lived three years longer than men, discriminated illegally against women by requiring them to make higher contributions even though they received lower monthly benefits when they retired.

One of the most controversial cases she handled was a 1988 racketeering trial in which the jury convicted eight men, including the reputed former head of the Genovese crime family. The conviction was overturned with unusually harsh language when the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that Judge Lowe had prevented the presentation of important evidence. ''This was an error of constitutional magnitude,'' the appellate judges wrote.

She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. The honors she received included a New York State Bar Association award for her ''outstanding judicial contribution to the criminal justice system.''

Judge Lowe was born in Manhattan and grew up in Harlem. She received a bachelor's degree in 1952 from Hunter College, a law degree with honors in 1954 from Brooklyn Law School, where she was president of her class and the first black editor in chief of the law review, and a master's degree in 1955 from Columbia Law School.

Judge Lowe's marriages to Edward Hatfield Lowe and Ivan A. Michael ended in divorce. She is survived by two daughters, Bess Michael of Washington, and Leslie, of Manhattan; a son, Dr. Edward H. Lowe of Edison, N.J.; a granddaughter; two sisters, Eddie Johnson Carkhum of Teaneck, N.J., and Ann J. Bolton of Los Angeles, and four brothers, Harry Johnson and Dr. James J. Johnson, both of Teaneck, and Dr. John William Johnson and Robert Johnson, both of the Bronx.